Sunday, May 25, 2008

At the ACM ICPC World Finals in Canada earlier this year I met the two other African teams and we discussed the possibility of hosting an ACM-like contest for African students. A considerable amount has happened since then, to the point where I'm starting to have discussions with sponsors.

There are about eight teams from North Africa that participated in their ACM regional contest. The top team came very close to beating our top team at the world finals, after five years of us pretty much dominating. There are also a few other African countries looking at sending teams to the IOI. The aim of this contest is to bring together Africa's top talent and put them up against one another. This will hopefully provide a more interesting challenge than our usual contests within South Africa, which are on a much lower level than the current next step up, international competition.

NVIDIA have offered to donate graphics cards as prizes and I'm meeting with two people from BSG early next week to discuss their potential involvement. If there are any other potential sponsors reading this post, please contact me privately (marco AT gallotta DOT co DOT za) and I will send you a proposal. This has a lot of potential to attract some really top students across Africa so I feel it's a great sponsoring opportunity.

If you're a student in Africa, watch this space for further details. I will be trying to spread the word to get interested universities shortly.